Trouble for RLTV?

Posted by Jeff Quinton on May 13, 2008

A source tells DCRTV: “Major, major layoffs sweeping through Columbia-based Retirement Living TV. Production department completely gutted, ad sales gutted, marketing gutted. Skeleton crews left within 60 days. Hearing that they’re going to suspend their pay-for-carriage deals with DirecTV and Comcast’s CN8. That doesn’t leave them in many households, and that they may go off the air for ‘up to 12 months.’ For those who’ve worked through such situations, that’s a nice way of saying the whole thing is probably about to go belly up.” RLTV uses a batch of media folks to host its shows, including WMAL morning man Fred Grandy.

RLTV has been using studio space on the main campus of UMBC as well as other locations around the country. They are also building a new office building in the BWTech@UMBC Research Park on the fringes of campus. That building is at 5525 Research Park Drive and the latest construction update indicates that it will be complete in December. I’m presuming some other divisions of Erickson might be using that building as well as RLTV but there’s no indication of how this rumor, if proven true, would affect that construction (the picture above is one I took of that job site last week.)

7 Comments »

Comment by Renee Beck

Please also see Cable Fax report from 5/12 - more of an accurate assessment of situation at RLTV:

Pink Slips: Retirement Living TV let about 30 people in production and production support go recently. The net said
the reason behind the moves are that 3 shows—“Another Chance for Romance,” “The Florence Henderson Show” and
“What’s Next?” are on hiatus (meaning it’s possible staffers could be rehired). The net still has 4 shows in production.
Comment by Someone Who Knows

The cable fax report is probably talking about the last round at the end of April… What about the new ones, Mrs. Beck?
Comment by Renee Beck

I can assure you as I sit here in my office RLTV is not going “belly up”. We are striving to re-focus our efforts to finalize our distribution deals. Our original programming efforts are decreasing, however we still have several series in production including our cornerstone daily live show “Daily Cafe”.

Please feel free to contact our PR department. You can reach Kimberly Simmons at 443-430-8948 for any further clarification.
Comment by James Gower

In the early Fall of 2007 RLTV contracted with the Nielson rating company to conduct a private ratings survey. It was touted throughout the company as a way to show how the fledgling network was gaining a ratings foothold. However, nothing was ever heard of the results, except in upper management. Obviously the results weren’t good or the company would have been crowing about them … at least to their own employees. I believe this was a wakeup call to Erickson about continuing to be an unlimited ATM machine for a television network that was going nowhere.
Comment by An Insider

Moral is low with layoffs and rampant favoritism by top supervisors
Comment by Another Insider

Web group layed off (and so was Renee Beck)
Comment by Yet another insider

Mr. Erickson, owner of the Erickson empire that includes his many well-run retirement communities around the country, as well as RLTV, is going to have to make a painful decision. Either replace the ineffective top management team at RLTV or scrap his dream of a television network for senior citizens. Many of us in the company know we are saddled with ineffective top management, that allows office politics to largely dictate how middle management and below are managed. Also, get rid of the useless, know-nothing, high-priced consultants, like the one for the web team, and get professionals in there that know what they’re doing and put the overall goals of the company as first priority.